Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
Yeah, but let’s be clear; houses weren’t being sold for a dollar. Mortgages were being assumed for a dollar. It’s just a pet peeve of mine. It’s not like you could literally own 100 houses for a $100 bill.
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Your exaggerating. Yes, theoretically you could literally buy 100 houses for $100. providing you had enough collateral to convince the lender it was prudent to do so. I believe there were people purchasing several of them at a time.
I seem to recall in W. Canada at the time, you could legally walk away from mortgages, so while you were assuming the mortgage debt (difference between PV and EV) the liability was often not all that great. You just had to wait until Pierre's disastrous scheme was dismantled, and house price inflation resumed.
I considered purchasing a house up the street from me for $1.00 with an $83,000 dollar mortgage. It was probably worth all of that at the time. The house would be close to a million now, and the mortgage would have been paid off 20 years ago by renting it.